Pieces of History

More than a decade and a half into the epidemic, HIV/AIDS
has amassed a history that is both tragic and hopeful,
that encompasses
the most public and the most profoundly personal.

Many pieces
of that history can be found in the National Museum and Archive of Lesbian
and Gay History, housed in New York's Lesbian and Gay Community Services
Center. Founded in 1990, the Archive is devoted to the lives and history of
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Although preserving the
history of the fight against AIDS is not the Archive's primary purpose, the
extensiveness of its AIDS-related materials testifies to the epidemic's
impact on the homosexual community, and the importance of that community's
response. In the United States, unlike in most of the rest of the world, it
was among gay men that the virus first made itself known. In the face of
public and official indifference at best, it was gay men and their friends
and allies who led the fight for medical research, education and prevention
efforts, and services for those who were ill.

Thus, among the
periodicals that the Archive collects are SIDA Ahora, Body Positive and the
People with AIDS Coalition's ("PWAC") Newsline. Among the
organizations represented in its vertical files, containing materials that
come in "one piece of paper at a time," are ACT UP, GMHC, and
PWAC. Then there are the discrete collections of materials from
organizations and individuals. It is the individual papers (in the language
of the archivist, materials from organizations are "records,"
those from individuals are "papers") that offer perhaps the
greatest insight into the epidemic's effect on the lives of individuals and
of a community.

By far, the most well-known person whose papers
are housed in the Center Archive is Michael Callen. A vocal AIDS activist
and advocate from the time of his own diagnosis in 1982 until his death in
1993, Mr. Callen was a co-founder of PWAC and editor of its magazine
Newsline, co-founder of the PWA Health Group, and co-founder and one-time
Board President of the Community Research Initiative (CRI). He was the
author of two books dealing with the epidemic and co-author of a third, and
was known as a singer/songwriter and member of the Flirtations, an a
cappella group.

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While the collection includes some personal
material from his days as a grammar school teacher and some of his songs
and poems, the majority is AIDS related. For example, there is a great deal
of material having to do with the AIDS organizations with which Mr. Callen
worked, along with programs and talks he gave at various AIDS conferences,
and interview notes and proofs from his books.

Several of the Archive's
other discrete collections offer historical perspectives and personal insights into what HIV/AIDS has meant in the lives of gay individuals and the gay community.

At the other end of the spectrum are the
papers of James R. Perry, a Supreme Court historian and a PWA. Mr. Perry,
who also died in 1990, was not an activist. He was a gay man who engaged in
lengthy correspondence with several friends in this country and abroad,
saving both the letters he received and copies of those he sent.
"So," according to Center Archivist Rich Wandel, who catalogued
the Perry Papers, "it's a real personal look at the disease. He and
his best buddy both had the disease. And there's a period of time in the
correspondence where you begin to realize what's happening here is that
they're no longer able to do for each other what they've always done for
each other as friends. They don't yet understand that it's because of the
disease. They haven't come to that realization yet. All they know at this
point is, 'You're not doing for me what you used to.'"

Several
of the Archive's other discrete collections offer historical perspectives
and personal insights into what HIV/AIDS has meant in the lives of gay
individuals and the gay community. A sampling:

The Wayne H. Steinman
Papers contain a wealth of material amassed during Mr.
Steinman's tenure as
Liaison to the Gay and Lesbian Community for the New York City
Comptroller
from 1984 until 1990, a crucial time in the development of New York
City's
response to the epidemic.

The papers of Michael Weltman,
who led an openly gay delegation to the U.N. on World AIDS Day 1991,
include correspondence with individuals around the world, much of it
containing personal testimony about HIV and AIDS.

The New York
Memorial Quilt Records chronicles a 1988 project of The Heritage of Pride
and the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, in which 1,200 quilt
panels were made at the Center's Quilt Workshop and displayed on the Great
Lawn in Central Park before being sent on to the NAMES Project for
inclusion in the national AIDS Quilt.

Bill Bahlman, whose papers are
still being catalogued, was active in the Lavender Hill Mob, an early
direct-action organization dealing primarily with AIDS and the predecessor
of ACT UP. The collection contains a great deal of material about the
Lavender Hill Mob and about ACT UP, with which Mr. Bahlman was also
associated, and includes printed testimony before various meetings of the
Presidential AIDS Commission.

Some 350 AIDS posters from around the
world were gathered by Michael Shernoff, a health education and prevention
specialist at GMHC, and donated to the Center Archive. The collection was
exhibited as "Graphic Fact: AIDS Posters from Around the World"
in 1991 and 1992.

The Jay Blotcher Collection contains newspaper
articles, flyers, press releases, and correspondence from his days a Media
Coordinator for ACT UP, a period that included the International Conference
on AIDS in Amsterdam in July of 1992.

Marty Robinson was one of the
founders of the Lavender Hill Mob, and his collection contains not only
papers, but such things as stickers and lapel buttons from
that
organizations early days.

Although the Archive does not
have the main body of ACT UP records, which were given to the New York
Public Library and may be examined only under NYPL's rather stringent rules
of access, some of the organization's materials are included in the collected papers of individual members. In addition, the Archive's collection of ACT
UP New York Records, 1991, consists of materials relating to the
distribution of the proceeds of an album made by the Red, Hot & Blue
Project, of which ACT UP was to receive a third.

When the idea
of creating the Archive of Lesbian and Gay History first came up in 1988,
Center Executive Director Richard Burns recruited Rich Wandel, Project
Archivist for the New York Philharmonic and a gay activist since 1970.
Wandel organized the materials and established the Archive, and today, as
mentioned previously, he serves as Center Archivist. The hallmarks of the
Archive are ease of access and ease of use; it has a strict policy of
nondiscrimination on any basis. The only grounds on which someone would be
denied the right to use the Archive is if Wandel finds reason to believe
that the person would pose a physical threat to the material, through
carelessness, sabotage, or theft.

"If Newt Gingrich came in
here and wanted to use the material," says Wandel, "I'd probably
watch him like a hawk, but he'd be allowed to do so. Or, if a 10 year old
came in here ( this is very different from your average large institution,
so the odds of it being an appropriate place for him or her are small ( we
would sit down and talk about it. And I would do my best to direct him or
her to the information needed. If that included our materials, fine; if it
meant sending him or her somewhere else, fine. But there's no 'I'm sorry,
you're not old enough' kind of thing. There's no 'You're obviously not a
serious researcher' kind of thing. Anyone here, from within the community,
from outside the community, is welcome."

The Archive is open
Monday and Thursday nights from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., and Wandel is there to
help people find what they are looking for. The first step in finding
materials is checking the computer, where the materials in the discrete
collections are housed, for the reference numbers of collections by topic.
Searching under "AIDS" will get you several screens of listings.

The next stop is a loose-leaf book that contains descriptions
of each collection, arranged numerically. The section for each selection
begins with a "finding aid," which explains how the Archive
obtained the material and establishes its right to have it, and lists
materials that were part of the original donation but were deemed not of
sufficient historical importance to keep in the collection. Wandel explains
that this list can offer insights about the person whose papers are in the
collection. Holiday cards, for example, may not be of particular historical
interest, but the fact that they were saved tells us something about the
person.

Also in the finding aid is a brief biography or
organizational history, with an emphasis on the period covered by the
materials in the collection. Some living donors prepare their own
biographies. This is followed by an overview of what is in the collection,
then finally a folder-by-folder listing of the materials. The James R.
Perry Papers, for example, consist of 143 folders, plus date books,
diaries, scrapbooks, and photo albums. A "Summary Guide to Current
Collections," which contains synopses of the information in the
finding aids, is also available at the Center or by mail to help
researchers, particularly those from outside New York, determine whether
the Center Archive has the material they need. Most of the Archive's
material is also listed in Research Libraries Information Network, an
on-line catalogue for libraries called "RLIN."

Wandel
and the Archive's trained volunteers are also available in person or by
phone to help users locate materials. Phoning ahead is suggested, since he
has a pretty good idea what the Archive does and does not have. "The
more you tell me about what that thesis, or paper for high school, or
curiosity or whatever, is," says Wandel, "the more I'll be able
to help you find what you need. But it's not a requirement."

Many of the materials in the collections are donated or willed
to the Archive. Michael Callen donated most of the papers in his collection
to the Center Archive in 1990, when he left New York for California, and
left the balance to the Archive in his will. James R. Perry willed his
papers to the Archive. Michael Shernoff donated the posters in his
collection.

Complete sets of organizational records are often hard
to come by. Those organizations that become large enough to have their own
offices usually keep their own records, rather than donating them to the
Center or another archive. The records of smaller organizations ( and there
are a lot of them ( tend to be scattered, and often no complete set exists
anywhere. However, when a former secretary or president cleans house and
wants to get rid of obsolete records, it can result in a windfall of
valuable material for the Archive.

Often the materials are donated by
family members, lovers, or friends, after someone has died. Wandel is
always on the lookout for unexpected items of historical interest. When a
person settling someone's affairs offers to donate a stack of periodicals
that the Archive already has, for instance, he asks what else may be about
to be thrown away. "People tend not to credit what is actually the
more valuable stuff ( the diaries, letters or snapshots they kept or any of
a number of things of that nature ( which are far more important to an
archive because they're rarer than The Advocate or Body Positive or
whatever."

Wandel confesses to some initial discomfort when
dealing with survivors. "I felt a little bit like a scavenger, to use
the nicest term, until I realized that what I'm saying when I'm talking to
this person or this family, is 'This life is valuable; we want to save it.'
And in a strange way sometimes, it's like a two-minute bereavement
counseling."

Some materials are just left anonymously, sent in
the mail or dropped off at the Center's reception desk. These gifts too are
valued. One such donation is the framed memorial to Gregory Joseph Villone.
No one at the Archive knows who Mr. Villone was, who had his photograph and
a letter from him framed, or who donated the memorial to the Archive. But
this gift occupies a place of honor on the wall of the Archive's office.

* * *

(The National Museum and Archive of Lesbian and Gay History is
located at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, 208 West 13th
Street, New York, NY 109011, (212) 620-7310.)

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